Historical background of the carbon cycle
The discovery that plants use carbon dioxide for growth in sunlight and return it to the atmosphere in darkness must have been the first scientific observation of part of the carbon cycle. The discovery of carbon dioxide as a gas that forms by fermentation and burning of charcoal, under the name of spiritus silvestris, is attributed to Jan Baptista (or Baptist) van Helmont, a man of medicine, alchemy, and early chemistry in the then Spanish Netherlands, in the first half of the 1600s (e.g., Graham, 1974). Presentation of the first general scheme of the carbon and nitrogen cycles was attributed to the French chemist, Jean Baptiste André Dumas, in 1841 (Rankama and Sahama, 1950, p. 535). Dumas (1842) described the cycle of CO2consumption and production by respiration, pointing to the sources of “carbonic acid” in the air and soil where it forms from decomposition of manure or organic fertilizers. He also pointed out that the Earth’s primordial...
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ppmv is parts per million by volume. In the atmosphere that is a mixture of ideal gases at the total pressure P = 1 atm, concentrations of individual gases in units of ppmv are also their partial pressures in units of 10−6 atm. CO2 at a concentration of 370 ppmv has a partial pressure 3.70 × 10−4 atm.
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Lerman, A. (2009). Carbon Cycle. In: Gornitz, V. (eds) Encyclopedia of Paleoclimatology and Ancient Environments. Encyclopedia of Earth Sciences Series. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-4411-3_28
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